A day in the life…
A day in the life… Sarsen Education’s Flash Developer
The day normally starts around 9am when I get to work, the first half an hour is our time to start the computer, make a nice cup of tea, read emails, blogs and other news feeds. I’m personally a fan of Engadget and Techcrunch but that’s the geek in me!
At around 9:30am we all get together for the morning scrum meeting, this is a short daily meeting that takes about 30-45 minutes where Niki will chair a round-table, stand-up session to discuss the immediate tasks. Everybody gets a chance to relay what they are currently working on, how it’s going and air any issues they are currently having. It’s a great way of keeping the project momentum at top speed but it also means you have nowhere to hide if you’re behind schedule! There is also a weekly “start-of-the-week” meeting where everybody gets to discuss the longer term objectives and deadlines over a couple of hours. This type of agile reporting really does help focus everybody to our collective goals, it also helps spot potential problems before they happen, which in software development is essential.
After the morning meeting, everybody starts on their personal tasks. I’ve been working closely with the designer recently. Taking my wireframe Flash development and making it look pretty. We’re currently working on a small product title called Mathematical Bingo. This product will allow teachers to play bingo games with the entire class and it can also generate homework sheets with a fun objective. During the morning the designer and I work on getting the group play mode looking really snazzy – it’s effectively a huge bingo ticker board that generates random questions to fit the answers on some of the pupil’s bingo-cards.
At about half twelve we take it in turns for the lunch order service, this week it’s Niki’s turn and he comes over and takes our order before popping over to the local farm shop to collect lunch. At around 1pm everybody downs tools and we take lunch together, there’s a pool table in the main house along with a PS3 and Wii which we play on the plasma TV. Pretty soon we’ll have our bigger office and although we’ll lose the pool table, we’ll be able to play computer games using the electronic whiteboard!
After lunch I work on my own, I‘m currently developing the homework generator for the bingo product. This neat function will allow teachers to generate individual homework sheets for every pupil, each with a unique bingo card so as they answer the questions, they can tick off any matching numbers. I’m developing this function in Adobe Flash along with a print function and it should be ready for testing by the end of the week with a bit of luck.
Late afternoon we all get together for a drinks break, slightly different from lunch as this time we have a chance to talk about how our day has gone and if any nasty bugs have turned up during the day. I’ve been having a real issue with a function I’ve written in the homework generator so our in-house programming guru offered to help me fix it.
For the last hour or so, we continue on with the homework generator bugs together, we managed to fix the tricky bit giving me just enough time for Niki to ask me to write this report.
Katherine Boardman
